Some recently asked how to find a good church. Let me give you some guidelines.
Pray and ask God where you are to be.
If you get no direction, start visiting.
Don't drive down stakes till you hear direction from God.
Don't keep going back to a place you like hoping God will approve it
If God directs, even if it involves distance or something you don't like, do it
Let me give you some history
My wife and I married in August 1967. We had been going together to a church near her home, about 50 miles from our new home in York PA. We stopped going. We tried a few other churches but found nothing that really impressed us and at the time we were not grounded well enough in God that we sought Him continually till we got an answer.
In December 1968 we had our first child and we were going to a church in York for about six months. It was a good church but it was in an area that was having problems. Within the next year two people were killed in that section of York in race riots. Only recently was the mayor of York placed on trial for the one death. We backed away out of concern.
A year later my wife's mother was in the last days of her life, dying with cancer. The church we had previously attended was kind to her and we decided to visit one evening to say thanks. On the way home, in fact I can still tell you where it was my wife looked over at me and asked, “You know what we have to do?”
I answered, “Yes.”
And the next week began 10 years of attending and participating in a church that was over fifty miles from our home. We attended enough Sundays to get Sunday school pins most years and made it to most Sunday evenings and Wednesday evening services. God was good. We were growing in Him and we were learning His word. Through the gas crisis of the seventies we managed to keep going.
Then one Sunday in the fall of 1979 our pastor mentioned that there was a church we should look at near our home. The church had started an ACE school and through it he got to know about this church. He gave us directions, they made no sense and we dropped it. A few months later my wife was taking one of her nephews to a dentist appointment in an area of town, near us but not a place we frequented. When I came home she told me she knew where the church was. We had not felt led of God to move so we simply put it on the list of places we would check if “it snowed heavy” some Sunday morning. We filed it till the week after Christmas. With no snow in the forecast we went past the church that night and picked the service times off the board.
We woke the next morning to four inches of snow. Certainly this had never stopped us from going to Fayetteville before. But we had said, “If it snows.” I am not big on fleeces, I have seen people taken wrong too often but this was not to move, this was to visit. So we went. Quite frankly, I was not excited about the church when I found out which one it was. I knew of it from the 50's when it was built. It had had problems from its inception. My dad was asked to wire it when it was built, the time of the year did not give him time to do it and the men were angry with him because he would not do it (thirty miles from our home, during the season and free of course). Let me clarify this, my dad did wire at least 5 other churches for free but they all fell outside his busy season at work. During that time he worked over 70 hours a week. The place had a bad feeling to me.
But over the next two weeks God started to work on me. The pastor was a fine teacher of the word. He was the college where the previous pastor had been middle school. No offense to our previous pastor, he was maturing the saints. We needed to move on. Our former pastor saw only one aspect of that, the wear and tear on us with about six hours of driving each week. His love for us transcended the desire for one more family in his congregation. I believe God has blessed him for that. He was obedient to God in releasing us.
We started there in January 1980. God blessed. We were able to be used and to learn. Then in December 1983 the company I worked for transferred us to Morton I and church hunting became a new thing.
